A windy day with several nuclear reactors off line in Britain resulted in an unlikely turning of the tables with more electricity in the country generated by wind turbines than nuclear power for a day.
On Tuesday, the National Grid said that wind turbines cranked up 14.2 percent of the electricity produced in the day, while nuclear power generated 13.2 percent.
The British Broadcasting Corporation reported the anomaly, which occurred three days after wind turbines produced a record 6,372 MW.
Former environment secretary Owen Paterson recently decried wind power's record in the country, calling wind power production “paltry.”
Wind power eclipsed nuclear energy for the first time while several reactors were shut down. Sizewell B was shut down due to a “statutory outage,” while Hunterston B Reactor 4 was shut down for maintenance and two units at Dungeness B were off, one for refueling and the other to repair a boiler pump. .
Two units at Heysham and two at Hartlepool were also down due to a recently discovered crack in a boiler.
Anonymous comments will be moderated. Join for free and post now!
Someone-either Nuclear Street or the BBC--needs to learn the difference between power and energy. Megawatts (MW) measure power, or energy produced per unit time. Thus, the windmills could not have produced "6,372 MW for the day." They could have averaged a power output of 6,372 MW over the course of a day, in which case they would have produced 6,372 MW-days or 152,928 MW-hours of energy. Since Britain's average power demand is about 40 GW, that seems about right.
Thanks for the comment/correction. Ed,
